


Purify Yourself in the Healing Waters

by Switchbladesis



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-23 16:10:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18553225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Switchbladesis/pseuds/Switchbladesis
Summary: "Prince?" I asked."Yeah. You know, 'two thousand zero zero party's over oops out of time' "  Kim started to half-sing the words despite herself, but I cut her off before she was in any danger of vocalizing the guitar riffs."I know who you're talking about. Is there any reason to believe he is a god? Instead of, like, Beyonce?""Well, I have a contact who thinks there might be, and he served her some pancakes. A lot of other people, too. From what you’ve told me, it sounds like that might cause something to happen. Think you should maybe talk to her?” Kim asked.





	Purify Yourself in the Healing Waters

**Author's Note:**

> This is incredibly self-indulgent but I'm posting it anyway. In honor of Prince, on the third anniversary of his death.  
> Unbeta'd, corrections on grammar welcome. Other concrit also okay, but I also spent maybe three hours on this.

I have never dealt well with sitting still. By month three of the suspension I had officially driven Bev, my mother, Jaget, Sahra, a few old mates that stuck around and responded to my Facebook messages, and Abigail up a wall. I’d even gotten more than a beleaguered sigh out of Nightingale after one too many tangents. Man cannot live on translations of Homer alone, and despite Nightingale and Bev’s combined efforts, I had no real intentions of taking up gardening. But I wasn’t sure what else to do.

So when Kim Reynolds called, I answered, even though it was likely to be at least skirting the terms of my suspension. She had to have been aware of it, and there was always the possibility that she was calling on something that wasn’t related to any ongoing investigations.

It turns out she wasn’t, for once.

"How sure are we that Prince was not a genii locorum?" 

I paused to parse the sentence. "Prince. The singer?" I asked. I’d explained what genii locorum to her in an email, but had used so many euphemisms for plausible deniability that I wasn’t sure what had gotten across, and I didn’t want to become Nightingale and softly correct her that genii locorum was the plural – though it was tempting.

"Yeah. You know, 'two thousand zero zero party's over oops out of time'. . ."  Kim started to half-sing the words despite herself, but I cut her off before she was in any danger of vocalizing any guitar riffs.

"I know who you're talking about. Is there any reason to believe he is a god? Instead of, like, Beyonce?"

"Well, I have a contact who thinks there might be, and he served her some pancakes. A lot of other people, too. From what you’ve told me, it sounds like that might cause something to happen. Think you should maybe talk to her?” Kim asked.

Well, I didn't have anything better to do, so I agreed to interview her contact and find out. What surprised me was when I told Nightingale about the situation (explaining who Prince was, but leaving out his battles with his record label and name change in the 90’s, no reason to muddy the waters), he was just as interested, and insisted I let Abigail sit in as well.

“It would be good practice for her to hear what taking a statement on another's experience with the uncanny looks like. And she has read enough accounts that she might recognize something you may not,” he told me over some decent Ethiopian food.

I'd offered to let Beverley sit in as well, being my houses’ resident genius loci expert, but she refused. "You do what you like. I’m not messing with Prince."

That caught my attention.  “Why? Do you know something?”

Bev shook her head emphatically, “No, but if I did, Fleet and Ty would both kill me before I’d be able to tell anybody anything. There’s off my manor, then there’s bloody Minnesota, and on top of that possibly impeding on Prince’s genius? I know what’s good for me, I’m staying out of it.”

“Ty, really?” I wouldn’t have guessed. Next time I need a favor from her I could try rare singles.

Bev shrugged. “She’s a fan. Must have been about her time in uni.”

And that was that. She left to get lunch with Rom instead, and asked me to text her when I was through. And to let me know if there were any good stories she could pass on to her sisters afterwards.

We ended up interviewing the contact ourselves over Skype: One Sofia Lopez: a woman in her late twenties, with light brown skin, curly dark brown hair in an undercut and wide dark brown eyes. Her accent made her sound like the wholesome mother from an American sitcom and clashed so thoroughly with her whole Latina lesbian punk look that I was left with the feeling of watching a bad dub – though part of that might have been the poor Skype connection.

Agent Reynolds had run into her while investigating some unexpectedly hostile actions taken in the upper midwest; though from the way she tells it, unexpectedly hostile in that area could be an outwardly expressed emotion stronger than mildly put out. She hadn’t explained how Sofia figured into her investigation, and discouraged me from asking. Sofia has also been clever enough to carefully position her laptop’s camera so there was as few revealing clues in the background as possible, but I did spy a neon green baseball cap hanging in the corner.

I started the interview off while Abigail took notes. "So you think that Prince might be the genius loci of. . . "

It didn’t take much to get Sofia to start talking. "Lake Minnetonka, definitely. I mean, the Mississippi is nice and all, but if there are gods anywhere up here, they're definitely in the lakes." And somehow, despite myself, I found myself hoping that anyone hanging out in the upper Mississippi didn’t get wind of that.

“Can you describe the night of the pancake pajama party?” Believe it or not, this was not the most ridiculous line I had ever had to say while taking a statement, but Abigail had to stifle a giggle. Sofia didn’t seem to notice.

"It was a thing that happens, you know? They announce something on the radio - free concert at Paisley Park, or like ten bucks, and if you wanted, you could try and find someone to drive you all the way out to Chanhassen. Then you have the opportunity be outside with a bunch of like minded individuals who also think it was a good idea to spend their night – maybe even be let in to the house for a while. You can talk to everyone else while waiting, dance a little bit. They play some music, maybe after a couple hours someone would come out to play live, and maybe if you’re really lucky, It turns out to be Prince. I was seeing a girl who was really into him when we went, and I wasn't doing anything else that night."

"And when you said he served you pancakes . . ," I said.

"I mean at the end of the night there was a line, there was a griddle, and there was Prince by the griddle giving us pancakes on some paper plates. There was also a juice bar, but it had its own line and we'd brought some water with us." Sofia punctuated each station with a gesture, all the better to emphasize the straightforward nature of the situation.

Abigail interrupted her, and I only winced a little. “You went to a celebrity’s house party and he gave you pancakes? This didn’t seem weird?”

“A little.” Sofia shrugged, but there was also a hint of a smile on her face. "But it’s Prince, and it’s Minnesota. We do celebrity differently over here. I know like five people who have collaborated with Doomtree personally and two members of the Chalice.”

I was wondering if I was supposed to recognize either of those groups, but Abigail looked like she wanted to follow up on that too, so it was up to me to get things back on topic, for once. "Did he tell you that you were under no obligation when serving you, or anything similar?"

"I mean, maybe. It was kind of late at that point. It sounds like the sort of thing he would say." She tried to think of any other direct quotes from him for a while, but that devolved into checking his twitter feed and his no photographer rule meaning that local reporters were stuck drawing stick figure pictures of him to illustrate their articles.

“What made you think he was a genius loci?,” I asked.

Sofia paused for a second and waved her hands before speaking. "It's just that - everyone in the Twin Cities loves Prince. Loves him. Everybody seemed to have a Prince story, especially about First Avenue. It’s like he’s a tiny purple Sasquatch in that place. And I was thinking of Agent Reynold's description of your rivers and about the food and . . . he fed a lot of people a lot of pancakes, and done a lot of other little things. He’s adored back, no matter what he did. I mean, he’s good, but you’ve got to wonder. I don’t think he’s up to anything nefarious, or anything. I’m just wondering."

“Do you have a Prince story?  Other than the pancakes,” asked Abigail.

“Oh yeah, I saw him at a Janelle Monae concert at First Avenue. Just standing on the balcony, looking down – taller than me, but not by much. It was a really good concert too.”  And the bright look on both of their faces meant that I had to cut this off as soon as possible or we’d never get back – though to be honest, I’d love to hear more about that concert, too.

"Did you notice any difference between how you felt about him changing after eating the party? Any sort of compulsions?," I asked.

“Not really. It was a good night, though, and a great story. I’ve gone back a couple of times, but it’s kinda far out there.”

I sighed, and then put as good of an air of authority I could muster, considering I had no clue what was going on. "You're probably fine. If he had tried something with you, you would have noticed something change after some time passed. Me and my associate here will do some more research and let you know what we find. I would be wary of accepting food from powerful beings in the future, though. Even if they are pop stars."

Sofia nodded. “Yep, will do. Email me if anything comes up?”

We exchanged emails, and that was that. Abigail searched the Folly for any possible references, and I looked too – once I was let back for research. Mania over musicians isn’t anything new – I’d say ask my dad but I’d really rather you didn’t – and plenty of teenage girls swooned over Lizst in his day. But if there was group that the old guard held in greater contempt than the fae, it’s teenage girls, and Abigail wrinkled her nose at some of the descriptions and declared them worse than useless.

Time went on, other mysteries and experiments came up, I was reinstated, the baby came and I gave up on certain concepts like ‘sleep’ and ‘coherent thought’ for a while. It was only a few weeks later that Prince died, and a few days later I received an email from Sofia.   

_Don’t know if you found anything, but I thought you should know. We gave him a proper send-off; shut down part of the city for an all-night dance party. I stopped by before work; danced for half an hour in my office clothes, paid my respects before picking up some Caribou. It was nice. Communal. A celebration of this thing called life. I think he would have liked it._

_If it was a compulsion, it hasn’t faded after his death. I don’t think it’s faded for anyone else, either._

"Is there any way to know now if he ever was something?," I asked Nightingale after showing him a printed out copy of the email. He’d come over to Bev’s and mine to drop off some things Molly had made; a ridiculous amount of food and about thirty hand-made bibs. We were grateful but also thinking we might need a larger refrigerator and wondering if there was a polite way to ask if Molly would be willing to help with the laundry. It was a mystery as to how something so tiny could get so much dirty.

Nightingale had a look on his face that I’ve gotten very familiar with over the last few years; where it wasn’t even that he didn’t know the answer as much as he never thought to question. "Without going there to see on our own? We'd probably never know. Even if we could be on the spot, who knows what there would be left to find."

But I thought of Punch, and the Bacchanalia, and the different characters of a city; the sorts of gods who might reside there. I thought of the all night dance parties and offerings of joy; of those dead gods in dead rivers all over the American west and what might replace them. Maybe it was nothing; maybe it was the type of vestigia that happens in any moment of shared grief or experience. But maybe there was a spark of something else, still there, a good guitar riff, a beat, and a dance.

**Author's Note:**

> [Technically I guess they weren't stick figures.](https://blog.thecurrent.org/2013/01/prince-dakota-jazz-club-night-2/)
> 
> And [what can I say, the man really liked pancakes](https://blog.thecurrent.org/2013/10/prince-serves-pancakes-performs-with-3rdeyegirl-at-paisley-pajama-party).


End file.
